Researchers have found that moderately high indoor concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) can significantly impair people’s decision-making performance.

Overturning decades of conventional wisdom, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have found that moderately high indoor concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) can significantly impair people’s decision-making performance. The results were unexpected and may have particular implications for schools and other spaces with high occupant density.

“In our field we have always had a dogma that CO2 itself, at the levels we find in buildings, is just not important and doesn’t have any direct impacts on people,” said Berkeley Lab scientist William Fisk, a co-author of the study, which was published in Environmental Health Perspectives online last month. “So these results, which were quite unambiguous, were surprising.” The study was conducted with researchers from State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University.

On nine scales of decision-making performance, test subjects showed significant reductions on six of the scales at CO2 levels of 1,000 parts per million (ppm) and large reductions on seven of the scales at 2,500 ppm. The most dramatic declines in performance, in which subjects were rated as “dysfunctional,” were for taking initiative and thinking strategically. “Previous studies have looked at 10,000 ppm, 20,000 ppm; that’s the level at which scientists thought effects started,” said Berkeley Lab scientist Mark Mendell, also a co-author of the study. “That’s why these findings are so startling.”

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from Nutramed.com for CO concentrations:"30 PPM Permissible Averaged over 8 hours200 PPM Maximum for acute exposure800 PPM Lethal < 2 hour exposure " I remember in 1988 research on it that CO causes hostility/anger(among other symptoms) at around 50-100PPM. I thought, now that is the reason for road rage in traffic jams!!!

_________________"With every decision, think seven generations ahead of the consequences of your actions" Ute rule of life.“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”― Chief Seattle“Those Who Have the Privilege to Know Have the Duty to Act”…Albert Einstein

from Nutramed.com for CO concentrations:"30 PPM Permissible Averaged over 8 hours200 PPM Maximum for acute exposure800 PPM Lethal < 2 hour exposure " I remember in 1988 research on it that CO causes hostility/anger(among other symptoms) at around 50-100PPM. I thought, now that is the reason for road rage in traffic jams!!!

note that this is CO2 that the thread was referring to. I am extra sensitive to CO so when I told my boss that I was being affected while working in a crawl space, I signed out and took it easy... the other three workers all had to be hospitalized. Dangerous stuff